GuideLive did its own piece aggregating content-curating the Central Track article about the inventor of the CueCat that Peter content-curated aggregated here on FrontBurner this morning.
I don’t know anything about the author of the GuideLive take. I don’t recall ever having noticed her byline before, but I have strong suspicions that this Brentney Hamilton had ulterior motives for writing this post: Making me feel like an obsolete husk of a human being.
I’m still a spry 37 years old. My AARP membership years remain in the distance, and yet I found Hamilton’s words to be littered with verbal landmines designed to make anyone born prior to 1989 feel roughly twice their own age. Witness:
1. “erm” in the headline. Never mind that it’s a misuse of a conversational-filler term meant to denote an awkward pause. Your instinct to point this out and to want to make a correction means you’re an old fogey who fails to understand that we live now in an age where the meanings of all words are no longer fixed but rather exist on a fluid spectrum. (Add 5 years to your age)
2. She notes that Jovan produced a talk show in the West End Marketplace, which is described as “(you know, the now vacant building that held the old, weird mall).” I remember well standing among a crowd there shortly after the place opened, gawking along with many others as some fudge shop put on a show of creating their chocolate confections. In other words, I remember when it wasn’t an “old, weird mall.” And so, (Add 5 years)
3. “ubiquitous ’90s infomercial personalities like Susan Powter, Tony Little, Richard Simmons and others that I am way too young to recognize” Must you drive the knife in this deeply with your boastfulness, Brentney? (Add 5 years)
4. Reference to “the Snapchat generation.” I sincerely hope that Snapchat does not beget an entire generation of its own. As far as I can tell, the application’s only function is for placing dog noses on the people in your photos. (Add 5 years)
5. “It was invented before Wi-Fi or Bluetooth made most devices cordless; simply logging on to the World Wide Web could take minutes.” I sort of pity Brentney and her peers, the unbearable lightness of their internet being. They will never know the shock of getting knocked offline in the midst of posting to a BBS because they forgot to disable the Call Waiting on the phone line. But the palpable disgust with which she writes this line forces me to (Add 5 years)
Totaling things up, I learn that, in the eyes of millennials, I’m something like 62 years old. If you’ll excuse me, now, I could use a nap.
